If Napoleon had escaped to America after his defeat at Waterloo, he would have been lionized as a champion of
liberty, favored with the affections of a Polish supermodel, and invited to invade South America. Having unearthed
this jeu d'esprit from a slumming scholar from the 1930s, the New York Times gathered all its authoritative
bulk to assure readers that yesterday's frivolity is today's profundity, an apt, though unintended statement of
cultural decline. Truly, yesterday's perversion and swinishness is today's entitlement and presidential style,
but never mind that, for now. The Times insists that a fashionable new discipline known as counterfactual history
is sweeping all before it. There has been a profusion of scholarly [sic] books and articles on the subject, with
titles like, Virtual History: Alternatives and
Counterfactuals and Counterfactual Thought
Experiments in World Politics.

One could write a book, nay, an encyclopedia under the latter rubric. To wit, the man with his finger on the
button of the world's largest (though quickly shrinking) nuclear arsenal engages in a tender dalliance with a gold
digger from the White House mailroom. There is nothing improper about the relationship because, in 1998, no relationship,
save a natural marital one, is improper. Gender, history, marriage, and fact all are social constructions in the
era of Cultural Bauhaus, and sexual relations just a series of parallelepipeds jammed unpleasantly together, as
Philip Johnson said of his Edifice Rex, a queer
theorem put into praxis. Thus, in return for Princess Monica's handfelt affection and refusal to inhale, our
President gave her stained skirts, copies of Leaves of Grass and other sundries. When these were returned,
by way of a refund, he arranged for her to work at the Department of Defense. A position also was held open at
the United Nations, but she demanded something truly prestigious, Burston Marsteller. From Beverly Hills and Bel
Air High to the Oral Office, Pentagon, UN, Revlon and thence onward into the inner sanctums of lawless law. Counterfactual
Thought Experiments in World Politics, Part 243: the Sequel. Read it and weep.

Gender, history, marriage, and fact all are social constructions in the era
of Cultural Bauhaus, and sexual relations just a series of parallelepipeds jammed unpleasantly together, as Philip
Johnson said of his Edifice Rex, a queer theorem put into praxis.

Weep? President Cllinton told his security detail that he has researched the Scripture and determined that his
preferred brand of sodomy is neither adulterous nor even sexual, legalistically speaking. In addition to his other
merits, he turns out to be a Bible scholar, his moniker, laughing gas. Virtual History strikes again.

Precisely because counterfactual history is the epistemology of the day, a sort of pseudo-philosophic anti-matter
like chaos over creation, uncreating, institutions like the Times cannot decide which trend is mushrooming fastest.
In an interminable article in its November 30 Sunday edition, the regime's paper of record declared that Queer
Theory and Porn Scholarship were last year's [big] college news, yesterday's papers, so to say. The latest academic
trend, announced cogitatress Margaret Talbot, is "whiteness
studies" whose goal, unnaturally, is to problematize whiteness.

What exactly does it mean to problematize whiteness? It doesn't mean anything exactly, but it does have a certain
brio for Marxist Professor Noel Ignatiev,
who sees studying whiteness as merely a necessary stage to the abolition of whiteness, a mass renunciation of all
the perks that come with being white. These perks include being the target of urban ethnic cleansing and of quotas
that enforce white unemployment. But Dr. Ignatiev accepts no such facetiae; he is dead serious. "Treason to
whiteness is loyalty to humanity" is the motto of his journal, the kind of ready-made fossil for which today's
publishers pant. There is youth culture and drug culture and gay culture, he declaimed at Berkeley last year, but
there is no such thing as white culture. Perhaps he is correct, not only perfectly correct, but correct.

Datum: Jennifer Reeder,
"White Trash Girl" and performing artists as fauna like her are identified by taxonomists at the NEA,
NEH and so on. The better to attract corporate and government sponsors, Reeder advertises herself as an inbred
biological disaster, and produces White Trash Trading Cards and videos. Trash girl is a natural unnatural adaptation
to the free market in depravity. Perhaps she seeks employment as head of a Federal Day Care Center (State College)
as a Professor of Diversity. A petty but characteristic player in the vending of spiritual and political slavery,
Trash Girl already has been featured in an anthology titled, White Trash, a career-burnishing stroke by a Female
Professor at Northwestern. It describes a certain aesthetic, a socioeconomic situation, she offers from her place
in the clouds of attitudinizing mockery, the very smog that enshrouds Johnson's Hancock Tower in Boston. These
same clouds belch from the stacks of University Presses: Critical White Studies (Temple, 1997), Displacing
Whiteness (Duke, 1997), Making Whiteness (Hale, 1998). They cannot consume forests fast enough to feed
this lust. But the whale humpers at Green Peace are unperturbed by these ecological depredations; so long as the
target of cultural harpooning is the late great white male, the green with envy are at peace with the slaughter.

Some dissenting voices take a predictable slant. Eric
Michael Dyson, Professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University, has sniffed at whiteness studies,
discerning therein a sneaky form of narcissism. Be that as it may, Dyson, publicist for lesbian rap artist, Queen Pen, is himself writing a book on whiteness so it will
serve the turn of black narcissus, too. He wastes no time making clear the suspicion among African-Americans that
whiteness studies are shifting resources back to white people and their perspective. Whether white people are truly
represented by Trash Girl or whether they have a collective perspective is unclear (though intellectuals like Dyson
have taught us that blacks do), but Dyson's keen scent for the throbbing vein of entitlements amply informs his
scholarship.

The determinists of race are again surging forward with economic materialists like Ignatiev. Without the privileges
attached to it, says the Marxist; the white race would not exist. Whites are not a fact of nature because there
are no facts, only social constructions and political projects pursued through virtual history. But Bolsheviks,
cultural and material, neednt worry about whites surviving or even restoring what they built, not even though Madonna
studies are past their prime. Phenomena like Trash Girl should re-assure them of white decrepitude. But concerned
(and bored) liberals like Talbot and her middlebrow publisher use trends like whiteness studies to work themselves
into high dudgeon (well, middling dudgeon) over the possibility that Western culture might somehow regain its dignity
and health. What social good does it serve, Talbot wrote, to heighten Caucasian awareness if in doing so you run
the risk of swelling Caucasian pride? Those who see Trash Girl as an exemplum of Caucasian pride may be expected
to urge their (nearly all white) readers to worry over such hypotheses. As therapy, perhaps more shaming is in
order from the neo-Victorians.

Despite the worries of Talbot and hype of the Times, Queer
theory cannot yet be denied the laurels as the hottest and fastest metastasizing field of graduate study. Its
styles and topics dominated the 1998 conference of the MLA (Modern Language Association) in Toronto. Ivy League
English Departments are still recruiting Queer Theorists (as well as queer theorists). Such debris floats in the
wake of ground breaking studies like Epistemology of the Closet, Queer Planet and English Literature and Male
Homosexual Desire by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, who may or may not stand up at the conclusion of This is Your Life in the gay 90's. Subject
of an interminable hagiography in the Times (01/17/98), Sedgwick grew up in a family in which the indeterminacy
of sex and gender were discussed at the kitchen table. "It was not assumed we were all straight," she
told the reporter. Perhaps that is why Sedgwick now describes herself as a straight woman who feels queer. If the
meaning of this statement seems elusive, such nebulae are to be expected in a culture in which academic disciplines
have devolved into fields and finally and inexorably into trends with the half-life of an erotic frisson.

Sedgwick's stardom and lifestyle epitomize the institutional decay of American higher education. For
many years she taught at Duke University where she held the Newman Ivey White Chair in the Humanities. White was
a distinguished and courtly scholar of the old school with a small fondness for left politics. He is inherited
by a polemicist for sexual confusion and disease whose writings underpin an academy-based movement called Sex
Panic whose goal is to demonstrate that gender
(one can say it in one's sleep) is a social construct. The Newman I. White Chair in the Humanities is married.
Her husband lives and works in New York City while she cohabits in North Carolina with one of her homosexual colleagues.
Who you are domestic with and who you are sexual with doesnt matter, she notes, leaving unclear which male served
her for which purpose, or in fact, what meaning, if any, domestic carries for her illumined intellect. Speaking
of exaltation, Sedgwick has written extensively about her own sexual fantasies, which feature spanking and other
diverse activities.

Sedgwick, 48, is childless (she and her husband never considered children or a traditional family to be a meaningful
option, he told the reporter), but she is represented by many intellectual progeny. Though each of them may be
as sterile as the monsters of Dr. Moreau, they swarm from the disordered, half-lit thoughts of today's cutting
edge institutions. The University of Minnesota is establishing a Center
for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. A Professor of Sexuality Today at the University of Virginia
has her students sculpt genitals in play-doh. Some may consider this the terminus of the Sesame Street approach
to learning, but Ms. Professor Susan Tate sets her students a goal which, given her methodology, is daunting indeed.
"I want them to be able to talk about penises, vaginas, and clitorises without laughing" she told the
Sunday Times (12/28/97). "I want them to understand that sex can be fantastic." It remains a mystery
to today's cultural powers that the joyousness and beauty of sex might have been achievable before college students
began sculpting genitals in play-doh. Whether the innate sense that sex rightly is joyous and beautiful will survive
such curricula will soon appear.

The answer to this question is being studied willy nilly at Brown University where students can major in Sexuality
(a recent graduate of the program now works in a gay health [sic] center in Boston). One of the four core prerequisites
is Queers and Culture, though the course is not listed that way on transcripts for fear that potential employers
might be put off by the real name. The pioneers of sexual constructionism sense that some petty bourgeois kulaks
still harbor prejudice against sadomasochism and prostitution, two other subjects in Browns core. Some bigots even
question whether it is better to spend time learning to use dildos or reading Kant, or to turn sex into an activity
like jogging. These questions already have been answered by our cultural commissars as may be gleaned from the
response of what the Times identified as a conservative but iconoclastic legal scholar.

The Chief Judge of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (Chicago) told the Times his reading of Plato's Symposium
has convinced him that American law should be re-written to provide complete acceptance of sexual diversity. Pederasty
was defined as a way station to the good by Judge Richard Posner who evoked some great names to buttress his case.
Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, T.E. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein
were homosexuals, Posner commented. Thus, homosexuality is not merely a ghastly blight. Maybe not merely, after
all, it also generates and transmits deadly diseases, violent crime and lots of profit. But the list of great men
adduced by the Judge indicates what the decay of Academia has helped do to American law. Oscar Wilde was a serial
pedophile who specialized in preying on impoverished boys. Gertrude Stein was a nasty lesbian and Jew-hating Jew
who nominated Adolf Hitler for a Noble Peace Prize in 1938. Keynes was a socialist who panted for a global state
of enlightened controllers. T. E. Lawrence was a ferocious anti-Semite and Wittgenstein an on-again off-again fan
of Nazism. The theme of The Pink Swastika fairly
shouts from Posners own list, but the message of the authors seems to have been missed. Since Queer Theory ensconced
in the intellectual apparatus and moral judgments of the U.S. Courts of Appeal, one should hesitate before consigning
it to the morgue of history. On March 3, as if echoing Posner's tolerance, the State Appeals Court of New Jersey
ruled it is discrimination to ban homosexuals from being counselors in the Boy Scouts. As has truth by lies and
memory by forgetting, so have fact been trumped by counter-fact and health by disease. Professor Dyson need not
worry about a resurgence of white culture.

There's no news but the old news, punned Shakespeare, and as America wheezes and blows toward the millennium,
Modernist ideologies show no signs of dying before they have killed everything in their path. Professor Dyson's
ouevre helps illustrate the point. Before getting into whiteness studies, he authored, Between
God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. One defers to exponents of black culture in taking
issue with Dyson's use of the term, bearing witness, but the issue at hand is Queen Pen, whose rap milestone, Girlfriend
is a paean to aggressive lesbianism. Ms. Pen is a former welfare client and self-described hustler whose two sons,
aged 8 and 9, no doubt manage very well without a father since family is just a social construct. The Times
(January 18) was eager to explore the details of Queenie's proclivities, but media savvy, she declined unless it
was to be a front-page story. Her producer says he respects her for it (her bent) noting, she is teaching women
to be what they want to be. It sounds like an ad for todays Army, or Air Force, or University, or the Oval Office.

As disciplines have devolved into trends and feminism has become the ideology of State, virtue has been disappearing.
At its core, virtue is manliness and respect for and encouragement of manliness, and nothing is more despised or
discouraged by those who shape and inarticulate culture today. Social policy and law are constructed so as to all
but prevent children growing up with a father or seeing that men are and can be good, kind, strong and faithful.
That is a fact the counter factualists must suppress.

A Professor at MIT explained in the Times last November that newborn humans
are little different than mice. Lacking cognitive abilities enabling them to determine and defend individualism
as adults (like him) do, it is difficult, he wrote, to construe killing them as murder.

Amid mainstream applause for feisty females breaking Hip Hop taboos and other customs encumbering their impulses,
nagging little data continue to seethe at the margins of the news. A newborn is found dead in a sewer in a nice
neighborhood in Queens. A 23-month-old boy is beaten to death by his foster mother in Brooklyn. Another woman wraps
her newborn in plastic bags and stuffs him in a drawer. A 28-year-old woman is caught on tape sodomizing the two-year
old in her care. A Santerian on Long Island smothers her daughter for religious reasons. These events are not necessarily
criminal. A Professor at MIT explained in the Times last November that newborn humans are little different
than mice. Lacking cognitive abilities enabling them to determine and defend individualism as adults (like him)
do, it is difficult, he wrote, to construe killing them as murder. A mother should take a week or so to coolly
assess whether she wants the infant or prefers a total birth abortion. The father, of course, has nothing to say
about the matter for his part was played out nine months before. This follows from the counter fact that people
are nothing more than animals. Anything else is a social construct from the hinterlands of ancient history, just
one virtual idea among many.

So what is one to make of our president and his multifaceted relationships, proper, improper and other? Is it
all a vast right-wing conspiracy? According to the Rodham-Clintonites there is no possibility of knowing, anything.
Power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and law is what they say it is. Only 15 percent of Americans may support
abortions after the first trimester of pregnancy, but to papers like the Times that means the public remains
"deeply divided on the issue" (01/16/98). Counter Factual Thought Experiments have all but carried the
day. Ethics are situational. We've dealt with the moral issues, as one virtual yuppie famously put it (John Converse
in Robert Stone's, Dog Soldiers [1975]). White Trash seems to have carried the day, so don't mess with Bill.